A proposal to remake Ed Ruscha’s classic
bookwork, replacing the corporate lots with
the private lots that spring up in my neighborhood
once a year, during the Canadian National Exhibition.
A folk-art archive of sorts.

Cars are a defining feature of the landscape and social space of Southern California. Especially in San Diego, where freeways weave like dangerous ribbons through a terrain of strip malls and tract housing, driving is an almost inescapable part of daily life...

On August 31, 1994 from 6am to noon, a team of 50 professional and volunteer parking attendants directed the arriving cars to predetermined lots according to car color. Each of the fourteen lots was filled with cars of a different color: dark blue, blue, light metallic blue, silver & gray, black, beige, brown, metallic raspberry, yellow, electric blue, white, aqua, green and red.

Rhizome is a proud media partner of New York's annual psychogeographic festival Conflux, which kicked off yesterday evening. See below for the festival's jam-packed schedule this weekend, you can also download a pdf version here or check out their interactive schedule here. All the events are open to the public, and they suggest a $5 donation.

Starting at Conflux headquarters in the Barney Building, Conflux and Foursquare present Foursquare @ Conflux, an interactive iPhone-driven social networking event that will lead participants on a tour of hidden East Village locations.

Of course, there was certainly a long history of machines and technology inspiring 20th century artists. The path of geometry, technology, and art was in part formed by the late paintings of Kandinsky, Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, and the machine aesthetic of artists like Charles Sheeler and Gerald Murphy. I was also influenced by the work of artists who were currently involved with imagery of machines and technology. For example, I loved the graphics of the London-based avant-garde architectural group, Archigram, and the Pop Art prints and paintings of the Scottish artist, Eduardo Paolozzi. There were also contemporary collaborative experiments like E.A.T—Experiments in Art and Technology—at MOMA, and Art and Technology, an exhibition of collaborations between artists and engineers, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Evil Interiors is a series of sixteen digital prints that depict the sets of some of the key scenes in film history: the home of the old man in Clockwork Orange, the hotel corridor in Shining, the empty warehouse in Reservoir Dogs, the motel room in Psycho, Hannibal Lecter's cage in The Silence of the Lambs. Using the editor in Unreal Tournament 2003, Torsson worked painstakingly on the architecture and on texture of the various parts of the furnishings to make these polygonal reconstructions totally believable.

"These images point at the psychological dimensions of violence, at least those that are imprinted in collective memory. As we live in a society where violence is accepted and ritualized our own consciousness is full of images of violence which can be triggered by a digital architectural space. Violence is not actually depicted here, but it certainly exists in the eye and mind of the beholder," Torsson explains.

To get to “PLOT 09: This World & Nearer Ones,” situated within the architecture and verdant landscape of Governors Island, you make your way to the southern tip of Manhattan, board a ferry decorated with signs that read “SHEEP” and “GOATS” (Mark Wallinger's cheeky contribution to the exhibition), and cross the mere half-mile stretch of water known as Buttermilk Channel. The journey is
long and elaborate enough to make you feel like you have embarked on an exciting, uncertain adventure. The island is decorated with a pastiche of architectural styles that indicate its rich history; Victorian houses mingle amongst an abandoned movie theater, an 18th-century fortress, an Episcopalian Chapel, a castle, and stern, seemingly haunted brick abandoned military and coast guard housing. PLOT09 is Creative Time's new public art quadrennial, and for its inaugural exhibition curator Mark Beasley invited nineteen international artists to respond to their surroundings. In an environment decidedly marked by its 400-year history, several of the strongest works in the show used this history as a point of departure.

Adam Chodzko's video installation Echo tells an imagined story about the children of the military personnel who once occupied Governors Island. According to the film, the children often gathered in the basement of the Officer's Club, directly below the ballroom in which the film is screened, to play an invented game where participants attempted to shed their material possessions through trade. In opposition to a capitalist logic, objects of high value were swapped for ephemera. The fictional trades made in the film recall the seeming improbability of unequal transactions made in history, like the initial trade of Governors Island by Native Americans to Dutch settler Wouter van Twiller for two axe heads ...

Dan Hill, of the architecture blog City of Sound, posted a nice synopsis of a long discussion between himself and architect and engineer Carlo Ratti today. Ratti is the director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab, which researches the impact of sensors and hand-held electronics on architecture and urban planning. In the article, Ratti talks about their work as well as his vision of a "responsive city."

Erik Adigard is a communication designer whose work stretches into domains as broad as identity systems, web sites, videos, visual essays, and book design, as well as documentary films and installations in art museums and exhibitions. With distillations of trends and ideas into visually arresting spreads and iconography, Adigard and his M.A.D. company partner Patricia McShane's work was a key element establishing Wired magazine's visual storytelling from its start in 1993. This last decade has seen Adigard nearly as involved in installations and art venues as he is with his admittedly broad design practice.

Adigard’s most recent public work was AirXY, for the 2008 Architecture Biennale in Venice, created with M.A.D. and Chris Salter. A multimedia installation with interactive animation, sensors, haze, light, and sound, AirXY explored space, architecture, media, and the human presence, extended by sensors and transformed by interfaces and networks. Its manifesto described the “de facto landscape of screens” and disembodied living and called for “re-materialization” that would unite “data and bodies.” It followed Dualterm, in which Adigard and Salter used a Toronto Airport Terminal as a mixed point of departure into a SecondLife 3D world, along with other, less virtual destinations.

Friends and sometime collaborators, we sat down in a San Francisco Mexican restaurant--in the midst of a blaring and lengthy Michael Jackson tribute--to talk about how his approach changes when working in the different modes of art and design. -John Alderman

The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.

One of 4 works commissioned by the Corporation of London as part of a new ‘Light Up Queen Street’ annual programme of winter commissions. Underglow illuminated a number of separate gullies (drains) in the vicinity of Guildhall Yard, King Street and Queen Street and were visible from dusk to dawn from November 2005 until February 2006.